Open-source microblogging site may become Twitter fallback

A new open-source social web service called identi.ca aims to reshape the …

A new open-source social web service called identi.ca challenges the conventional approach to microblogging and offers some potentially significant advantages for end users. The identi.ca web site and its underlying Laconica software platform, which were created by WikiTravel founder Evan Prodromou and his company Control Yourself, could be the alternative that many disillusioned Twitter users have been looking for.

Microblogging services are emerging as an important medium for communication. These services—which enable users to share succinct messages with groups of followers—fill an important gap between instant messaging and e-mail. The appeal isn't immediately evident to the uninitiated, but many users have found that microblogging provides easy access to useful dialog that wouldn't emerge spontaneously in any other setting.

Although microblogging offers much value to end users, the concept comes with serious implementation and monetization challenges that aren't easy to solve. Twitter, the dominant service in the microblogging arena, has become a victim of its own success. Twitter's developers haven't been able to scale the service to accommodate the rapid growth of their user population and the ecosystem of third-party applications built on top of the service. The consequence has been feature failures and frequent outages that frustrate users and disrupt conversations.

Numerous copycats and competitors have attempted to supplant Twitter as the number one service, but most have encountered the same problems or failed to gain sufficient traction. Although greater choice and competition in the microblogging space could be beneficial for consumers in many ways, the downside is fragmentation. Despite the fact that almost all of these services offer rich APIs for third-party development, they do not offer any mechanism to facilitate interoperability—they are, fundamentally, walled gardens. Microblogging services today face the same kind of balkanization that occurred when instant messaging services entered the mainstream in the 90s, necessitating the use of multiprotocol clients.

An open solution

Identi.ca offers a new approach that could potentially resolve the scalability and fragmentation problems that are seemingly inherent to the medium. The solution, says Identi.ca's Prodromou, is the software platform Laconica, which implements the OpenMicroBlogging specification, a simple open protocol for facilitating interoperability between microblogging services. This opens the door for a federated messaging model where users from different microblogging services can seamlessly interact with each other through this software compatibility layer. A particularly significant advantage of this decentralized approach is that it will help to naturally balance the user load across multiple services, reducing the potential for scalability problems.

Another attribute that differentiates identi.ca from other services is that its code base—Laconica—is entirely open source and distributed under GNU's Affero General Public License (AGPL), a copyleft license for web software that requires site operators to provide source code to end users. Anyone can take the identi.ca source code and set up their own competing microblogging service as long as they continue to make their source code changes available to everyone.

Adoption of the open-source model is accelerating development of the Laconica software and encouraging third parties to set up their own Laconica-based services that interoperate with identi.ca, thus distributing the load and enabling individual operators to innovate within their own sandboxes. Although deployment isn't easy yet, a growing number of users have successfully installed Laconica on their own servers and hooked them into the talk on identi.ca.

Although identi.ca has a lot of potential, it's still lacking in the maturity department. Some must-have features like SMS integration aren't in place yet, and it isn't widely supported by third-party software programs because the official API is still under development. Some of the features missing from identi.ca at launch have been added by its hard-working developers. In recent updates, the system gained a replies tab and an integrated search tool for finding users and messages. Other features include an instant messaging gateway, OpenID support, RSS feeds, and FOAF user relationship descriptions.

The developers say that more features are coming soon, and the IRC channel on Freenode is buzzing with activity. The official API is being specified and some unofficial techniques discovered by myself and others make it possible to programmatically interact with the system and build largely functional client applications.

It's too early to say whether identi.ca has what it takes to topple Twitter and avoid the scaling problems it has faced. There are definitely a lot of unanswered questions about whether it can achieve profitability (one possible monetization strategy would be to build branded Laconica services for major companies that are trying to tap into the Web 2.0 phenomenon). Regardless of whether identi.ca manages to achieve success in the long term, the concepts that it brings to the table are very promising and will likely shape the future of the microblogging ecosystem.